If there were solid evidence of this fact, the statement wouldn't need a qualifier.
Their behavior is consistent with what you'd expect from an intelligence agency. Such as well-timed releases during the 2016 US Presidential Election which seemed to heavily favor a candidate with strong ties to a foreign government well known for their intelligence capabilities.
Why else would the podesta emails be trickled out over the course of the 30 days prior to the election, each time with a promise that the juciest ones are yet to come? Wikileaks has never done a trickle-release like that with any other document dump.
Why were the podesta emails different if not to influence the election?
You don't have to invent an answer to that question, they have provided their own explanation. Wikileaks believed the theft of the democratic party seat would be downplayed, refuted, or ignored by the 24-hour news-cycle.
Unfortunately, it seems to have happened anyway.
Also wikileaks has done multi-part staged releases on many occasions before and after, including the russia files and vault 7.
> Unfortunately, it seems to have happened anyway.
If by "theft" you mean "the person who got the most votes got the nom," sure. That's not really news though. I mean, it is, but not for the reason you think it should be.
The DNC does not function as a popular vote, but with a complex system of campaigning, finance, and ultimately delegate voting.
The DNC seat was stolen through illegal redirection of funds, manipulation of public debates, and a deliberate media smear campaign which led to the DNC chairwoman's forced resignation.
You could have stopped there. The major disconnect between public perception of the political parties and actual party function is the party ultimately nominates who it chooses. Votes are cast because it's assumed Americans wouldn't support a party that simply nominated a candidate via authoritarianism or autocracy, not because either party believes in the wisdom of the mob structurally. If anything, "wisdom of the mob" voting is more reflective of the Republican party's process (and with the nomination of Trump, it kind of showed).
You claim there was illegal redirection of funds. Was it actually illegal? Or merely in apparent violation of the party's charter (which could make the party less trustworthy but is not otherwise automatically illegal)? The best I can dig up is that there is a lawsuit alleging the DNC violated campaign finance law.
> Votes are cast because it's assumed Americans wouldn't support a party that simply nominated a candidate via authoritarianism or autocracy
No, the modern candidate selection process in each of the major parties isn't an abstract response to theoretical concerns about what Americans would respond to, but a concrete response to real issues identified through previous nomination processes.
> If anything, "wisdom of the mob" voting is more reflective of the Republican party's process
No, it's not; the Republican Party process is designed to artificially create an insurmountable perception of momentum for the early leader because of experience about how early lead usually favors the institutional candidate, and the set of early primaries and caucuses favor, more than the country generally, the establishment faction of the party, so that this provides both the right candidate and a short competitive part of the primary with an early shift to general election campaigning. The Democratic system through 2016 (changes are planned for 2020 in response to 2016) in general design (pushing committed superdelegate counts into horserace delegate coverage hasn't historically been the norm) favors a longer competitive period and broader geographic competition but provides a safeguard against a hung convention. Each of these has failure modes—if superdelegates commit early and the media included them in horserace coverage, the Democratic system gets the same kind of artificial inevitability as the Republican system. If a celebrity candidate sucks up early attention with a large but weak field where establishment support is divided, the Republican method work against the establishment and lock in the same kind of advantage for the celebrity it is designed to for an establishment candidate. And if a well-funded establishment decides to take that fight down to the wire with whoever it has standing after the early winnowing, it can drag out into a long primary fight if the type the system is designed to avoid.
Very few people would have considered Trump "the institutional candidate", although I guess the GOP conspiracy has maybe fooled us. Even fewer people would have considered all the DNC superdelegate crap to have been a broad geographic democratic competitive scenario.
It is my view of the law that if you collect money under a stated intention of nonbiased party-backing and subsequently redirect those funds to Hillary Victory Fund, fraud has been constituted. Washing transactions between 50 different organizations to subvert campaign finance laws, as you referenced, also seems like an illegal redirection of funds. (federal lawsuit) Using DNC party funds for activities such as paying ex-intelligence operatives to manufacture deliberately infactual reports seems like a multi-part illegal redirection of funds. (steele dossier)
The first two words of your link are "If true," and the report it is using four anonymous sources...
Keep in mind, the company contracted to produce this report, Fusion GPS, was also paid to produce "evidence" that north korea was responsible for hacking Sony in 2014... so you may want to spot-check your evidence.
It's international espionage. Four anonymous sources is all we're ever going to get.
And the consensus appears to generally be that NK did hack Sony in 2014, so I don't know what you're on about. There are suggestions of alternatives but nothing concrete or in accordance with the known evidence.
Hey man WL shouldn't get credit for predicting the actions of the media, just because the media happened to act exactly as they predicted! Anyone could have predicted those actions, just by assuming that MSNBCNNWaPoFox was all-in for a war in Syria. It didn't take a rocket surgeon...
Well I mean another consistent explanation is that Assange and/or the decision makers in Wikileaks are just reactionaries and wanted Donald Trump to win the election for that reason (as opposed to because they have been owned by the KGB).
I suppose you'll just have to wait for Mueller to wrap up his probe into the matter.
Several GRU officers have been brought up on charges related to the hacking of the DCCC and DNC, the subsequent dissemination of their findings to Wikileaks, and related payoffs. This suggests that there is concrete evidence that the GRU was collaborating with Wikileaks, it's just not yet publicly available.
The investigation has taken very little time as yet relative to other investigations of sitting presidents (chart is ~4 months old, but we still have only possibly reached the end of the next shortest investigation) [0]
>Their behavior is consistent with what you'd expect from an intelligence agency. Such as well-timed releases during the 2016 US Presidential Election which seemed to heavily favor a candidate with strong ties to a foreign government well known for their intelligence capabilities.
Alright... Help me understand how this does not reflect WaPo, CNN, NYT, and others in an identical way.
Did any of those sources make a big announcement that they have super-duper incriminating emails about a candidate and then slowly release them in a trickle over the course of 30 days leading up to the election?
Emails which, by the way, were so boring and mundane and contained so little evidence of misconduct that people determined to hate Clinton needed to treat "pizza" as secret code for "child sex slaves", to extract a scandal from them.
And that's surprising how, exactly? Guess what, 4chan /pol/ supported the exact same candidate, rare pepes and all, purely "for the lulz". Would you expect Assange to behave any differently?
Not to mention, that candidate had been on every channel of TV news 24 hours a day every day for 1.5 years leading up to the election. Holy crap the guy that was on TV got elected! Wow that's a conspiracy if I ever heard of one. /s
I don't think we have any document released yet that describes any full picture.
We do have this statement (and a little more detail inside) in a report by a joint report by the US Intelligence Community (regarding Russian interference with elections):
"We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks."
But that doesn't explain whether Assange is either a "compromised front" for the GRU or someone else, or more a "useful idiot" to Russian intelligence for their goals.
Nonetheless, I will say, at minimum, Wikileaks and Julian Assange can no longer be seen as a neutral player, at minimum. And not a reliable narrator, either. For example, some of their tweets on the Panama Papers, which in theory I would think would be something they would in theory support, were rather strange, and actually stooped into ridiculous conspiracy theory involving USAID and George Soros (eg https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643...). I generally don't treat sources that delve into conspiracy theory with a whole lot of respect...
It's a joint report by the US Intelligence Community. There is no “US National Intelligence Agency”; the position of Director of National Intelligence was created to specifically split the role of overall head of the intelligence community (the DNI) from the head of a particular agency (the overall head of the IC used to be the Director of the CIA.)
George Soros is a billionaire and very prolific political activist. Just mentioning his name does not make a dog whistle, since he legitimately does have a lot of influence. Of course, I do think that people acting as though he controls the world is a dog whistle, but we shouldn't act like he never has a finger in the pie.
I don't see why you are downvoted. It's a very valid question. Wild claims made without evidence are essentially conspiracy theories. Surely HN has higher standards than that?
There are views which are verboten on HN: supporting AMP, supporting ad-based business models, telling people not to use free services if they don't like them, and criticizing certain public figures. You might voice them, but prepare for the downvotes.
Oh, the bubble is real. Anyone not annoyingly vegan, anti-car, urban yimby-yuppie who still rents and making at least 300k making socially regressive technology, badly, with the newest popular framework is going to have to make sure to not only be relevant, but tickle the egos of the great majority while making their soon to be buried point.
What are you criteria for near certainty and what evidence-supported claims are there that satisfy those criteria?